Here we stand, on the brink of August ... cannot believe my busy summer filled with bike races and sailing and work work work is nearly past (although in Southern California, August tends to be more summer-like than July!) Yesterday afternoon we participated in a SAIC* webinar for parents of incoming students, cannot believe in less than a month our little Megan will be off to college! Wow.

That's a picture of Meg fifteen years ago, at 3. Hehe.

* SAIC = School of the Art Institute of Chicago

And meanwhile...

Take a self-guided tour of the International Space Station. I must confess, I've spent way too much time "lost in space". Reactions: it's really small, and really messy. What do they do up there? The ISS is amazing but then again, it's actually just a boondoggle, built to give the Space Shuttle somewhere to go. Maybe the international cooperation angle was key. I love that the virtual tour ends at "the Russian section", which is "coming soon" :)

Cotton vs Kerry, it's no contest. The Iran deal is so bad, but the politicians behind it are worse. As poor as President Obama has proven to be, I do believe he is trying. Whereas with Secretary of State John Kerry, he is just going through the motions, desperately hoping not to be found out. We badly need a better class of politicians. (Like Tom Cotton...)

Back to space (more cheerful) ... Rosetta finds primordial soup of compounds on comet. "The European Space Agency (ESA) ... announced that the mission to explore Comet 67P has discovered 16 organic compounds, described as 'carbon and nitrogen-rich.' The agency says on its website that the discovery, made by the Philae lander includes four compounds that have never before been detected in comets." Little Philae managed to be quite useful before crash landing, and it might not be dead yet, either.

About those huge JavaScript frameworks... Two things are true: the frameworks are not that huge, and current websites generate huge pages which lead to slow response times. I agree entirely with Craig Hockenberry that engineers should test their sites under real-world conditions, especially for mobile. But I think advertising and tracking are the true culprits, not frameworks.

I missed this: Is one of these your dream car? A celebration of the 85th birthday of Italian design firm Pininfarina. I must confess one of these *is* my dream car :)